It always makes me feel just a little sad to have to call the media out for being ridiculous, but sometimes a call for repentance is necessary.
News needs to sell, bills have to get paid and all those people who dedicate their lives to bring the news need a way to put food on the table. That being said, in achieving this goal, there can sometimes be a tendency to exaggerate otherwise unnewsworthy information in headlines. My favorite recent example of this came from an article by MSNBC bearing the headline “Pregnant women more at risk from swine flu.” The article said the swine flu isn’t any worse than the regular seasonal flu and that pregnant women are more at risk from the flu, period.
Slightly more alarming to me is the media’s hullabaloo over the new H1N1 vaccination. Concerns that there will not be enough of the vaccination to go around are refuted by the fear that this vaccine was developed too quickly and is a health hazard itself. It seems that the media has weighed the availability of the H1N1 vaccine as equivalent to life or death. In reality, the less-than-ample supply of this new vaccination is not the life-or-death situation that the media has made it out to be. And if all else fails, we’re still doing fine on our supply of regular flu vaccinations.
There are two different vaccinations this year: the regular flu and the swine flu.
Students, as a demographic, are typically young and healthy, which would seem to put us into a low-risk category, but the close proximity in which we interact with each other on campus increases that risk significantly. You very well might get swine flu or any other flu strains headed our way this season. Getting a flu shot might be something you want to do, and it might not be.
Glen Hanson of the U’s pharmacology department said it’s a toss-up between the two vaccinations. There’s really no difference in severity between the regular flu and H1N1.
So if you feel you’re at a high risk, get an H1N1 flu shot. If you don’t want one and feel OK about running the risk of being out of commission for a few days with that achy, under-the-weather feeling, that’s fine too. Either way, do it because it’s what you and your health care provider decide is the right course of action for you, not because the media scared you into it.
